


a withering thing

by thedevilbites



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationship, F/M, Humor, Implied Sexual Content, Minor Angst, Power Dynamics, Snake allusions, slight Chloe bashing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-18 18:35:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28622643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilbites/pseuds/thedevilbites
Summary: The hairs on her arms and legs stand on end. She’s sweating. She’s human.
Relationships: Eve/Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 20





	a withering thing

**Author's Note:**

> this is loosely based off of S4E4, when Lucifer first meets Eve, and diverges from there

Her dress is white and pure and untouched, all the things she should be. It hangs around her knees like the petals of a calla lily. Eve watches it twist and turn as she follows Lucifer into the elevator, like moving in the wind. 

She lets the fabric graze her fingers, clenches her hands, watches it glide over her knuckles. The elevator _dings,_ gilded wiring and flashing, neon buttons grinding to a halt. 

“Have a seat,” Lucifer tells her, voice clipped and brittle and mouth curled like the end of a hot poker, “I’ll get you something to eat.” He leaves her be, disappears briskly into a corner of the room. His words echo in her head on loop, a revolving door: _have a seat, have a seat, have a seat, something to eat..._

She deflates a little. Her stomach hisses. Eve thought he’d be more excited to see her. 

She cautiously maneuvers her way to the couch. The marble floor is cold and translucent. She’s barefoot. The couch sighs wearily under her weight, and it feels like real leather. She wants to ask if it is human skin, or another animal, but now does not seem like the right time. Lucifer does not seem up for conversation.

He comes back with a sandwich cut diagonally on a plate. She didn’t even know the Devil made sandwiches, let alone cheese and ham. Eve frowns, then digs in.

_….have a seat, something to eat, something to eat…_

She glances up at him between bites, smiles. He returns it instantly. Eve wonders who else has noticed that he drops it after a few seconds, then looks, almost demurely, at the ground. 

_...something to eat, to eat, to eat..._

She cocks her head, listening. 

_...let me eat, let me eat, let me eat…_

Her hands twitch towards the hem of her dress. 

This is the start of something.

\-- 

She sleeps in his bed, and Eve realizes just how nervous she is when she is finally alone. His sheets smell half-human and half...something else. She buries her face in his pillow—black silk shipped specifically for him from India—and inhales heat and ash. Is this what the dead smell like? It calms her, slightly. 

Lucifer takes the couch.

It is a foreign concept, the Devil stepping aside for her. It is an unsettling one, too. The Lucifer she knew always took what he wanted without concern for the wellbeing of others (with a few exceptions). 

Perhaps this means he does not want her. That, in itself, is even more unsettling than Lucifer growing soft. 

Eve suddenly feels, astoundedly, angry. His clock reads 3:00 AM. She throws the sheets off of her, and slips to the ground, barefoot as always. 

She wears the same dress, but she is not cold. Something is pounding in her veins, an animal beneath her skin. It spurs her forward. She steps out of his room, and finds Lucifer wide awake, his blackened silhouette sitting upright on the couch.

“Lucifer,” she commands, puts her hands on her hips, and he turns towards her. 

“Eve,” he greets her, bowing his head. 

She goes for the direct approach, raises her voice. “Clearly you’re growing—“ she stops herself. 

Something is wrong.

She falters, pitches her voice lower, “Lucifer?” 

He blinks at her. His eyes are red. 

She is suddenly confused, as if on instinct; her brain’s defense mechanism. She does not know what to say, or why she came out here. 

Lucifer cocks his head. His eyes flare brighter.

“Yes? Have you, too, come to tell me to abide by your bidding? _Change_ myself?” He is bitter, something low and sinuous and gritty. She sees a glass of whiskey balancing on the end of the couch, half-filled.

Eve shakes her head, no sound coming out. He stands up. She drops her hands numbly, backs away.

 _“Well?”_ He hisses at her. His eyes flash, his tongue curls. A snake.

_....let me eat, let me eat, let me eat..._

The hairs on her arms and legs stand on end. She’s sweating. She’s human.

“No,” she whispers, then adds, “my Lord,” unable to censor herself.

He recoils as if she’d slapped him, blinking at her, then looking around himself. They are both panting, and here she realizes she has fallen to her knees. He gives her a withering glance, but she thinks he’s more angry at himself then at her. “Go back to sleep,” Lucifer says, and even though he has stepped back into the shadows, she still feels the command reverberate under her skin like a swollen burn.

She swallows, shaking.

Eve bids him goodnight.

\-- 

The next day, when she tries to apologize, Lucifer will hear none of it. Literally. The first time she tries, he waltzes right past her as if she’s invisible. It’s like he’s pretending last night didn’t happen. She doesn’t understand. She tells him so.

Lucifer stills, one foot on the landing of his bedroom, dressed in a three-piece Armani suit. She helped him pick out the tie. 

“Eve,” he says, and it sounds guttural, as if he’s in pain, “do you not realize that I...don’t even want to be me.” He pauses, refuses to look at her, and she gets the feeling this is the first time he has said this out loud. “Do you have any idea what that is like?” He continues, “Can your mortal brain even _conceive_ the possibility of endlessly wishing for something that _will never happen.”_

She thinks of Adam and his hands and blood that spotted like a tapestry between her legs. “Yes, Lucifer,” she says quietly, iron rusting in her stomach, “Why do you think I left?” 

They ride down the elevator in silence.

\-- 

Eve decides that the disgruntled brunette detective, who looks slightly ape-like without makeup, in her opinion, is making him like this.

So, she takes matters into her own hands, and grabs said detective’s arm mid-run with a clipboard and pen in hand. She can see Lucifer sprinting ahead in the distance. “What is your relationship to Lucifer?”

The detective is—upset, it seems. She fixes Eve with a glare. “You do realize we’re in the middle of a crime chase, right?”

Eve raises an eyebrow. “Do you?”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you realize this is a crime chase?”

The detective looks like she’s trying very hard not to hit her.

“Look,” Eve placates, because she’s seen Lucifer defuse situations like this, and it always seems to work, “we both want the same thing, right? So why don’t you tell me what you—“

“If you say ‘desire’ I will shoot you.”

“Oh,” she stops, then starts again, “well, you see, ‘want’ isn’t exactly the same thing as ‘desire’—“

“Jesus,” the detective throws her hands up, clearly exasperated, “both you and Lucifer are just _completely insane.”_

A breakthrough! “Ah, so you think he’s insane,” Eve murmurs, jots this down onto her clipboard.

“What? No—wait, that’s _my_ stuff, where did you get that?”

“I took it.”

“You _stole_ federal property—“

“Lucifer said it was okay.”

“Of course he did. You know what,” the detective rubs her eyes, “I can’t even deal with this right now.”

“Should I be writing this down?”

“Don’t write anything down—“ she narrows her eyes, “I’m sorry, who did you say you were again?”

“Eve,” Eve hisses, dropping the office supplies, trying her best to impersonate Lucifer’s Devil-ness, “and I’d stay away from Lucifer if I were you.” She tilts her head, considering, then asks, “Don’t you have a daughter?”

The detective's mouth falls open. “Are you _threatening_ a police officer?”

“Um,” Eve pauses, “this doesn’t usually happen when Lucifer—“

There’s a shout from behind them. “Eve, Detective, don’t worry,” Eve turns around to see Lucifer hauling someone in handcuffs by the throat, “I’ve caught our Bad Guy.”

Eve squeals, and claps. 

The detective’s eyes, if possible, grow even wider. “Lucifer, _this isn’t the guy we were looking for—“_

Eve guesses this was a pretty successful interrogation, all things considered.

\-- 

Later, Eve admits: 

“She thinks you’re crazy.”

“Who?”

“The detective, she thinks you’re insane. She told me.”

“Well,” Lucifer laughs emptily, and it sounds like something has cracked within him, “she doesn’t seem to be thinking so highly of me these days.”

Eve hesitates. She wants to say the right thing. She grins at him, “I do, though. Think highly of you.”

Lucifer leans over her, cocks his head. “Do you?”

He puts a finger under her chin, sweeps her hair to the side, and tilts her neck back. Her pulse skitters under his attention. “Mm,” he hums, mouth splitting open wide, “Indeed you do.”

\-- 

The detective comes over for a drink. Eve intends to remain stoically silent for the entire affair, until she realizes that “drink” is really Lucifer’s code for “boring cop crap,” so she excuses herself from the table.

There's a party going on downstairs, anyway, and Eve remembers someone—maybe that blonde cop from the precinct?—telling her that Lux is always open for Happy Hour (and held at unreasonably late hours).

So she goes to the bar, orders a whiskey (Lucifer exclusively drinks this stuff, so it must be good) and ends up ordering a second, then a third. She laughs with the bartender. Laughs with the young couple sitting next to her, too.

The whiskey is making her feel all warm and glow-y, so she waves goodbye, and pushes her way through the crowd where the beat is the loudest. 

Someone rubs up against her, sticky with sweat and heat and a bitter vodka martini spilled on them half an hour ago. Eve is ecstatic. She wants to dance. She looks up at them from under her lashes, pure and bright and magnetic.

They—some nameless thing in a muscle tank and a phoenix tattoo curling down his shoulder—extend a hand. Eve cocks her head. His hair is the same shade as Lucifer’s, although that could be from the overhead lights (this time, a vibrant purple). She takes it.

The night is a blur of sharpened nails and sweat and gasps, all the things she should not be coalescing before her.

\-- 

She has no recollection of getting up, and appraising her surroundings. A dull pounding in her head, the realization that she is back in Lucifer’s bed—alone.

She remembers tripping, though, on her way to the couch. Everything is careening sideways. Her vision is pixelated like a computer game. She feels sick and dazed all at once. Eve wants to be swept up into the darkness, and never let go.

“Lucifer,” she whispers, tries to make out his sleeping form, but ends up collapsing on the couch alongside him. He’s sitting up, anyway, like the first night she came out here.

“Hello, Eve,” he mutters, then there’s a clink as he puts his glass down. 

Eve—is still seeing spots. “I want to be swept up by the darkness,” she tells him conversationally, trying to hold the room still with her hands.

“You—what?”

She gives up, sags into the cushions, then turns towards him. “You know, like you did,” she grins suddenly, “In the Garden. Adam was _so mad.”_

“Eve,” he pauses, frowning, then settles on, “you’re drunk.”

“And _you_ didn’t answer my question,” she says, pointing an accusatory finger at him. Or, maybe towards the television. Spatial awareness has never been her strong suit.

“Ask away.” He’s slurring slightly. She briefly wonders if alcohol even impacts him the same way it does her, or if it’s all an act. A strange mask to wear for no particular reason. She blinks, and the thought slips away like water swirling down the drain.

She scoots even closer to him. “Would you do it again, if I asked?”

Lucifer blinks at her. His eyes are slits, tiny black marbles. They hypnotize her. She waits for them to turn red, and he does not disappoint. She can see herself within them, dancing. The flames lick up her white dress, but she does not gasp in pain.

 _“Please,”_ she whines, tips head forward against him. The couch is spinning for a different reason, now.

He rises, and she instantly stands up with him, but he pushes her back down. Eve slips off of the cushions, down on her knees. He shakes his glamour off of him, like shedding a second skin. She can only see red. The hairs on her neck stand on end again, and her hands tremble.

When Lucifer steps forward, her heartbeat spikes, beating in double time. He tips her chin up, and she feels new life breath within her.

Eve closes her eyes, and pictures fangs.

**Author's Note:**

> i've been wanting to write a Eve/Lucifer fic for a while now, and i'm so glad i was finally inspired to write these two! this is the fic that pulled me out of my writer's block/writing 'funk' as i like to call it. 
> 
> @thedevilbites on tumblr, come say hi!


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